New research along the frontiers of materials engineering holds promise for a truly astounding performance improvement for computing devices. A research team helmed by Markus Hellbrand et al. and associated with the University of Cambridge believes the new material, based of hafnium oxide layers tunneled by voltage-changing barium spikes, fuses the properties of memory and processing-bound materials. That means the devices could work for data storage, offering anywhere from 10 to 100 times the density of existing storage mediums, or it could be used as a processing unit.
Published in the Science Advances journal, the research gives us a road through which we might end with far greater density, performance and energy efficiency in our computing devices. So much so, in fact, that a typical USB stick based on the technology (which is called continuous range) could hold between 10 and 100 times more information than the ones we currently use.
